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Walker murders DNA testing inconclusive, so far

Cliff Walker holds his son, Jimmie, while his wife, Christine, holds their daughter, Debbie. The family was murdered in their Osprey home in December 1959. The case has remained unsolved for more than 50 years.

Published: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 1:11 p.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 10:58 p.m.

A resolution in the 53-year-old murder of an Osprey family appears increasingly unlikely, following continuing delays and ambiguous results from DNA tests on the remains of two notorious killers depicted in the book and movie “In Cold Blood.”

It has been six months since authorities exhumed the bodies of the pair, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, from the Kansas cemetery where they had been buried since their 1965 execution for the murder of the Clutter family.

The Clutters were killed a month before the Walkers, including Christine, 24, Cliff, 25, and their children, Jimmie, 3, and Debbie, who was almost 2, when they were killed in their home.

Despite the growing angst of family members and local law enforcement, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation reports that the DNA tests on a potential match between the Kansas killers and evidence from the Osprey crime scene in 1959 is “inconclusive.”

Last month, the KBI said the DNA test results would be ready in eight to 10 days. At the time, Deputy KBI Director Kyle Smith said if results were inconclusive, the tests would be run again.

“At some point, you just have to call it,” he said in April. He would not say with more certainty what the results were likely to reveal.

The agency now has no timetable for when testing will be finished, but Smith said more testing would be done. “The analysis is not completed,” Smith told The Associated Press. “We are still trying.”

Attempts to reach Smith for comment in Kansas were unsuccessful.

Smith said the KBI would eventually turn over results of the DNA tests to Florida officials, who will announce any links between the cases.

Sarasota County cold- case detectives sought the exhumation after going over the case for years.

Shortly after the Clutter slayings, Smith and Hickock fled Kansas and spent some time in Florida, leading to speculation that they might have had a role in the murders of the Walkers, who grew up in the small town of Arcadia in DeSoto County.

Family members, who have lived for years with no answers in the case, are tired of waiting.

“It's just more frustration,” said Pat Myers of Lake Placid, the half-brother of Christine, who was raped, beaten and shot to death.

Christine's husband and two children were also shot. The youngest child was drowned in a bathtub.

Christine was a popular high school majorette, and Cliff, who participated in the town's rodeo, worked as a ranch hand.

Family members had hoped DNA results would bring answers, but the protracted wait makes that seem less likely.

“Every time we talk to the Sheriff's Office, it's next week, next week, next week,” Myers said Wednesday.

Cascarella said her generation should be the last to worry about what happened.

“Hopefully, it stops now,” she said.

EARLIER...

Associated Press

TOPEKA, Kan. -- DNA testing so far has been inconclusive on whether two men executed in Kansas for the 1959 killings that inspired the book "In Cold Blood" can also be linked to the unsolved murders of a Florida family weeks later, a senior investigator said Wednesday.

Kansas Bureau of Investigation Deputy Director Kyle Smith said the agency will continue testing material collected from the remains of convicted murderers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Investigators believe the men fled to Florida after killing the Clutter family in a gruesome case later documented by Truman Capote in his genre-forming classic.

"The analysis is not completed," Kyle Smith told The Associated Press. "We are still trying."

The KBI initially projected it would have definitive results from the DNA early this month, but the agency now has no timetable for when the testing will be complete.

"Justice never rests," Smith said.

Hickock and Perry Smith were hanged in 1965 in Kansas for the killings of Herb Clutter, his wife and two of their children in the family's farmhouse outside the southwest Kansas town of Holcomb.

The hunt for the killers mesmerized the nation and drew journalists from across the U.S. to the small farming town. Capote's book takes readers through the killings, Hickock's and Perry Smith's trial and their execution. It is celebrated because it reads like a novel; scholars have long debated its accuracy.

Attention quickly turned to Hickock and Perry Smith when, only weeks after the Kansas killings, a Florida family was murdered. Cliff Walker and his wife, Christine, along with their two small children, were killed in their home in Osprey, Fla., south of Sarasota. The case was never solved.

Investigators believed that Hickock and Smith fled to Florida after killing the Clutter family, then traveled to Las Vegas where they were captured. They were cleared of the Walker murders by a lie detector test — but in 1987, a polygraph expert declared that such tests were worthless in the 1960s. Christine Walker also had been raped, so Florida authorities sought a comparison to a DNA profile from semen on her clothing to the DNA profiles taken from the remains of Hickock and Smith.

The convicted murderers were buried in a cemetery in Lansing, near the state prison in Kansas where they were hanged. Kansas officials had their remains exhumed in December so state investigators could collect bone fragments for DNA samples.

Kyle Smith said the KBI will eventually turn over results of the DNA tests to Florida officials who will announce any links between the cases.

"In Cold Blood" alludes to the Walker killings in a short passage; Capote incorrectly states that the murders occurred near Tallahassee, Fla., about five hours north of the actual scene. He also relates a conversation between Hickock and Smith on a beach in Miami, and has Smith speculating that "a lunatic" copied the Kansas killings. The book says that in reply, Hickock "shrugged and grinned and trotted down to the ocean's edge."

Authorities in Florida have said Hickock and Smith were spotted at least a dozen times from Tallahassee to Miami, and in between. On the day of the Walker murders, authorities have said, Hickock and Smith bought items at a Sarasota department store.

The Sarasota County Sheriff's detective who began re-investigating the Walker deaths in 2007 said the Walkers had been considering buying a 1956 Chevy Bel Air, the kind of car Hickock and Smith were driving through Florida.

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